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takyon writes:

How the mushroom dream of a 'long-haired hippie' could help save the world's bees

Years ago, in 1984, [Paul] Stamets had noticed a "continuous convoy of bees" traveling from a patch of mushrooms he was growing and his beehives. The bees actually moved wood chips to access his mushroom's mycelium, the branching fibers of fungus that look like cobwebs. "I could see them sipping on the droplets oozing from the mycelium," he said. They were after its sugar, he thought.

Decades later, he and a friend began a conversation about bee colony collapse that left Stamets, the owner of a mushroom mercantile, puzzling over a problem. Bees across the world have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Parasites like mites, fast-spreading viruses, agricultural chemicals and lack of forage area have stressed and threatened wild and commercial bees alike. Waking up one morning, "I connected the dots," he said. "Mycelium have sugars and antiviral properties," he said. What if it wasn't just sugar that was useful to those mushroom-suckling bees so long ago?

In research published Thursday [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-32194-8] [DX] in the journal Scientific Reports, Stamets turned intuition into reality. The paper describes how bees given a small amount of his mushroom mycelia extract exhibited remarkable reductions in the presence of viruses associated with parasitic mites that have been attacking, and infecting, bee colonies for decades.

"upstart" writes:

The bipartisan plan to end surprise ER bills, explained:

The policy proposal, which you can read here, essentially bars out-of-network doctors from billing patients directly for their care. Instead, they would have to seek payment from the insurance plan. This would mean that in the cases above, the out-of-network doctors couldn't send those big bills to the patients, who'd be all set after paying their emergency room copays.

The doctors would instead have to work with patients' insurance, which would pay the greater of the following two amounts:

• The median in-network rate negotiated by health plans
• 125 percent of the average amount paid to similar providers in the same geographic area

The Senate proposal would also require out-of-network doctors and hospitals to tell patients that they are out of network once their condition has stabilized, and give them the opportunity to transfer to an in-network facility.

[...] it's pretty good policy too! That's the general feedback I got from Zack Cooper, an associate professor at Yale University, who, along with his colleague Fiona Scott Morton, has done a lot of pioneering research to uncover how frequently and where these surprise bills happen.

"It is fantastic that they're doing something, and that it's bipartisan," he says. "It's one of those areas where we can agree what is happening now is not good, and this gets us 80 percent of the way to fixing it."

[...] "My concern here is that in-network rates are already quite high, so we're cementing that into the system," he says. "The current world gives emergency physicians tremendous power in negotiating higher in-network rates."

See also: Emergency room visit costs: what's the price of care?

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Facebook unveils smart displays, promises not to snoop on your video calls

Just as Amazon's newest Echo Show comes out, Facebook enters the smart display space with two devices of its own. The company announced the Portal and Portal+ smart displays today, both of which are voice-controlled speakers with touchscreens that focus on video chatting with Facebook Messenger.

The $199 Portal looks similar to the new Echo Show with its 10-inch, 1280×800 touchscreen, but its speaker sits at the bottom edge, facing the user. The $349 Portal+ has a mammoth 15-inch, 1920×1080 display that can rotate into portrait and landscape orientations. The speaker sits at the bottom of the display, while a camera, more noticeable than that on the regular Portal, sits at the top.

[...] Plenty of people will scoff at the idea of bringing a Facebook-made smart display into their homes, especially ones with cameras and mics. Facebook hasn't been the most forthcoming company when it comes to letting users know which data it collects and how it's using that data. It also doesn't have the best track record when it comes to keeping users' data safe. Hoping to quell concerns, the company included a mic/camera disable button on both Portal devices, as well as a physical camera cover.

Does pressing the mute button alert the FBI/NSA/CIA to your suspicious activity?

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

[...] buried in each used nappy [diaper -Ed.] are hidden treasures, according to Marcello Somma, who is head of research and development at Fater, an Italian joint venture between Procter & Gamble and Angelini Group.

Fater has developed what it claims is the first industrial-scale process that can extract these valuable materials, and it is already up and running in Treviso, Italy. Now, as part of a project called EMBRACED, it is building a biorefinery next door to make best use of these recycled substances.

Technical minds have been trying to recycle nappies since 1992, says Somma, but it has proved to be a ball of trouble.

"When you change a nappy you wrap it onto itself and so basically you have a kind of bomb of four waste types intimately linked with each other," says Somma. "There is plastic waste – polyethylene and polypropylene, paper waste – because there is cellulose, a super-absorbent polymer and the organic fraction – the human contribution."

Fater, which has been trying to recycle disposable nappies for a decade, has found the trickiest stage is at the start: opening it.

Hmm, the baby's first diapers must be especially valuable, containing the black tar they do.

Original Submission

AnonTechie writes:

A new analysis by researchers from Brown University and the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation has found that nonfatal injuries in the U.S. in the year 2013 cost more than $1.8 trillion.

And nearly all injures are preventable, said Dr. Mark Zonfrillo, an associate professor at Brown University's Warren Alpert Medical School and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Hasbro Children's Hospital.

The study, led by Zonfrillo, found that in 2013 about one in 10 individuals in the U.S. was treated for an injury at a hospital, resulting in an annual cost of $1.853 trillion. The findings were published on Monday, Oct. 8, in the journal Injury Epidemiology.

Annual price tag for non-fatal injuries in the US tops $1.8 trillion

[Also Covered By]: EurekAlert

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Artificial intelligence in space exploration is gathering momentum. Over the coming years, new missions look likely to be turbo-charged by AI as we voyage to comets, moons, and planets and explore the possibilities of mining asteroids.

AI is already a game-changer that has made scientific research and exploration much more efficient. We are not just talking about a doubling but about a multiple of ten, Leopold Summerer, Head of the Advanced Concepts and Studies Office at ESA, said in an interview with Singularity Hub.

The history of AI and space exploration is older than many probably think. It has already played a significant role in research into our planet, the solar system, and the universe. As computer systems and software have developed, so have AI's potential use cases.

The Earth Observer 1 (EO-1) satellite is a good example. Since its launch in the early 2000s, its onboard AI systems helped optimize analysis of and response to natural occurrences, like floods and volcanic eruptions. In some cases, the AI was able to tell EO-1 to start capturing images before the ground crew were even aware that the occurrence had taken place.

Other satellite and astronomy examples abound. Sky Image Cataloging and Analysis Tool (SKICAT) has assisted with the classification of objects discovered during the second Palomar Sky Survey, classifying thousands more objects caught in low resolution than a human would be able to. Similar AI systems have helped astronomers to identify 56 new possible gravitational lenses that play a crucial role in connection with research into dark matter.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

By severely curtailing the effects of antibiotics, the formation of organized communities of bacterial cells known as biofilms can be deadly during surgeries and in urinary tract infections. Yale researchers have just come a lot closer to understanding how these biofilms develop, and potentially how to stop them.

[...] Fighting biofilms has been particularly difficult because it hasn't been well understood how bacteria cells make the transition from behaving individually to existing in collective structures. However, the researchers in the Levchenko lab, working with colleagues at the University of California-San Diego, recently found a key mechanism for biofilm formation that also provides a way to study this process in a controlled and reproducible way.

The investigators designed and built microfluidic devices and novel gels that housed uropathogenic E. coli cells, which are often the cause of urinary tract infections. These devices mimicked the environment inside human cells that host the invading bacteria during infections. The scientists found that the bacterial colonies would grow to the point where they would be squeezed by either the walls of the chamber, the fibers, or the gel. This self-generated stress was itself a trigger of the biofilm formation.

"This was very surprising, but we saw all the things you would expect from a biofilm," said Levchenko, the John C. Malone Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Yale Systems Biology Institute. "The cells produced the biofilm components and suddenly became very antibiotic-resistant. And all of that was accompanied by an indication that the cells were under biological stress and the stress was coming from this mechanical interaction with the environment."

[...] With this discovery, Levchenko said, researchers can use various devices that mimic other cellular environments and explore biofilm formation under countless environments and circumstances. They can also use the devices introduced in this study to produce biofilms rapidly, precisely, and in high numbers in a simple, inexpensive, and reproducible way. This would allow screening drugs that could potentially breach the protective layer of the biofilms and break it down.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

upstart writes:

What you need to know about the first-ever DNSSEC root key rollover on October 11, 2018

DNSSEC is a system of digital signatures that prevent DNS spoofing. Using DNSSEC, it does not matter where your DNS answers came from, since the DNS resolver or application can verify the DNSSEC signatures to ensure the DNS data is not tampered with..

DNS is hierarchical, which means that the parent zone vouches for the cryptographic key used by its children via Delegation of Signing (DS) records. At the top of the hierarchy stands the DNSSEC Root Key. This key was first deployed on July 15, 2010, and it is scheduled to be replaced with a fresh new key on October 11, 2018 at 16:00 UTC.

What do you need to know?

If all goes well, end users and operators will notice absolutely nothing. The DNS community coordinated with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), DNS vendors, operating system vendors and DNS operators to ensure this change will be as uneventful as possible.

But there might be a few old forgotten and unmaintained servers, virtual machines, or containers that will run into issues if these servers had enabled DNSSEC more than a year ago and were not updated since that time.

How do DNS software and DNS services pick up the new key?

It already has! Properly working software should have already picked up this new key. To update the DNSSEC Root Key, a process defined in RFC 5011 is used. It involves pre-publishing the new key signed by the current key and when you have seen this new key for more than 30 days, trust the new key as much as the current key.

[...]

Again, it is not expected that any DNS issues will happen. But if they do, it is recommend first to simply try restarting your DNS server. Then try to resolve something with DNSSEC, for example by using dig +dnssec dnskey . and if that works, you should be good, although you might want to keep monitoring the situation for a little while longer.

If you still see that DNS is not working properly you can temporarily switch to a public DNS operator. These DNS operators run DNSSEC-enabled public resolvers. You can switch to one of these services, or one of your preference, by configuring these public DNS services in /etc/resolv.conf. We don't endorse any of these in particular, but they are well-known public DNS providers that support DNSSEC and may be useful if you need a working DNS service quickly.

[...] To get the latest information published by ICANN, see their Rollover Resources Page. That page will be updated during the event in case of unexpected issues.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040

A landmark report from the United Nations' scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought and says that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has "no documented historic precedent."

The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.

The report "is quite a shock, and quite concerning," said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. "We were not aware of this just a few years ago." The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.

The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change. The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.

Scientists Call for $2.4 Trillion (per year) Shift From Coal to Renewables

The world must invest $2.4 trillion in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut the use of coal-fired power to almost nothing by 2050 to slow the quickest pace of climate change since the end of the last ice age, according to scientists convened by the United Nations.

[...] To limit warming to 1.5 degrees [Celsius] would require a roughly fivefold increase in average annual investment in low-carbon energy technologies by 2050, compared with 2015. The $2.4 trillion needed annually through 2035 is also an almost sevenfold increase from the $333.5 billion Bloomberg NEF estimated was invested in renewable energy last year.

Also at Reuters and CBS.

See also: IPCC climate change report calls for urgent action to phase out fossil fuels - live

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Species-rich forests store twice as much carbon as monocultures

In 2009, BEF-China began as a unique forest biodiversity experiment in collaboration between institutions in China, Germany and Switzerland. The large-scale project investigated the importance of tree species richness for the good functioning of forest ecosystems. Stands of trees comprising different numbers of species were planted -- from monocultures to highly species-rich plots with 16 different tree species on an area of 670 square meter.

After eight years, such species-rich forest plots stored an average of 32 tons of carbon per hectare in aboveground biomass. By contrast, monocultures averaged only 12 tons of carbon per hectare -- less than half as much. During photosynthesis, the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert the carbon to biomass. When a forest stores more carbon, this helps reduce greenhouse gases and at the same time also indicates high forest productivity.

The fact that biodiversity increases productivity had previously been demonstrated through experiments in grassland ecosystems in Europe and the USA. By contrast, since it was assumed that all tree species occupy similar ecological niches, a minimal effect of biodiversity was conjectured for forests. Evidently, however, this assumption was wrong. "In the forest biodiversity experiment, biomass increased just as quickly with species richness as it did in the meadow ecosystems. As a result, even after just four years, there were clear differences between the monocultures and the species-rich forests," explains Prof. Helge Bruelheide of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, co-director of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), which together with the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Adacemy of Sciences oversaw the field experiments. These differences grew continuously over further four years.

Impacts of species richness on productivity in a large-scale subtropical forest experiment. Science, 2018; 362 (6410): 80 DOI: 10.1126/science.aat6405

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Imagine What This One-Handed, Rubik's Cube-Solving Robot Could Do With a Deck of Cards

At one point in time, it was considered an accomplishment when a robot arm could pick up something as delicate as an egg without crushing it between a pair of pincers. But as researchers from the University of Tokyo's Ishikawa Senoo Lab demonstrate—with the assistance of a high-speed camera monitoring the subtle movements—this agile three-fingered hand can manipulate and reposition Rubik's fiendish puzzle cube with impressive dexterity.

[YouTube video: Rubik's Cube Manipulation Using a High-speed Robot Hand]

Not pictured in this video is an overhead camera system that can capture and process video at an astonishing 500 frames per second. It recreates what your brain is subconsciously doing as you play with a Rubik's Cube in your hands, constantly monitoring the shape, position, angle, and center of gravity of the toy so that the fingers are always positioned properly to provide enough torque to spin the faces of the cube and line up all those colored tiles.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

Increasingly Human-Like Robots Spark Fascination and Fear:

Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in Madrid.

She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International Conference on Intelligent Robots.

"You mentioned project management. Can you please tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the man.

She may not understand the conversation, but she's been trained to detect key words and respond to them.

A source of controversy due in part to fears for human employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless inevitable, engineers at the conference said.

The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more easily.

In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese psychologist who specialises in relations between humans and robots.

Welcoming robots into households or workplaces involves developing "multipurpose machines that are capable of interacting" with humans without being dangerous, said Philippe Soueres, head of the robotics department at a laboratory belonging to France's CNRS scientific institute.

takyon writes:

Interpol Chief, Detained by China, Resigns Under 'Supervision' of Party Watchdog

In a stunning move that could set back the country's efforts to expand its global presence, the Chinese Communist Party announced late Sunday that the missing president of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, was under investigation on "suspicion of violating the law" and was "under the supervision" of an anticorruption watchdog tied to the party. The announcement that Mr. Meng, a Chinese national, was being detained was posted online by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party's watchdog against graft and political disloyalty, on Sunday night. A few hours later, Interpol said it had received Mr. Meng's resignation "with immediate effect."

[...] While China may have had its eye on placing its citizens in other top posts at prominent global organizations, "the fact that Meng was 'disappeared' without any notice to Interpol will undermine this Chinese global outreach effort," Mr. Ku said. "It is hard to imagine another international organization feeling comfortable placing a Chinese national in charge without feeling nervous that this might happen."

The announcement of Mr. Meng's detention came hours after his wife, Grace, told reporters in Lyon, France, that before her husband had vanished on a trip to China, he had sent her a phone message with an emoji of a knife. She interpreted the knife image to mean "he is in danger," she said in a brief statement to reporters on Sunday in Lyon, where the two were living and where Interpol is headquartered. Ms. Meng gave her statement at a hotel, keeping her back to reporters so that her face would not be captured on camera, a precaution that she said was for security reasons for herself and her children. She said she had received the message with the knife image shortly after Mr. Meng arrived in China. It came just four minutes after she received a message from him saying, "Wait for my call," she said. She has not heard from him since. She reported his disappearance to the French police on Oct. 4. A French police investigation is now underway, with the authorities saying that he had boarded a plane and arrived in China, but that his subsequent whereabouts was unknown.

In addition to serving as president of the international crime fighting body, Mr. Meng is also a vice minister in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

Also at Bloomberg and The Washington Post.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists Just Created Quantum Artificial Life For The First Time Ever

Encoding behaviours related to self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, and (inevitably) death, a newly created quantum algorithm has been used to show that quantum computers can indeed mimic some of the patterns of biology in the real world.

[...] Using the IBM QX4 quantum computer, the researchers coded units of quantum life made up of two qubits (those basic building blocks of quantum physics): one to represent the genotype (the genetic code passed between generations) and one to represent the phenotype (the outward manifestation of that code or the "body").

These units were then programmed to reproduce, mutate, evolve and die, in part using entanglement – just as any real living being would. Random changes were introduced via rotations of the quantum state to simulate mutation, for example. The good news is that these actual quantum calculations matched theoretical models the team had come up with back in 2015.

Also at Motherboard.

Quantum Artificial Life in an IBM Quantum Computer (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-33125-3) (DX)

[Not be confused with John Horton Conway's Game of Life from 1970. --Ed.]

Original Submission

fliptop writes:

A couple of years ago the Ukraine was looking for investors to help build a renewable energy power plant inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. On October 5th, about 100 meters (330 feet) from the remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Solar Chernobyl flipped the switch on their 1MW facility:

This first stage occupies about 4 acres, and authorities have offered over 6,000 acres (about 10 square miles) for solar farms. Ultimately, as much as 100 MW of solar power could be constructed. The area is already well set up with connections to the power grid. The four nuclear reactors could produce up to 4,000 MW.

Two previous solar-energy farms—with 82 and 100 MW capacity—were built in the Crimea region of Ukraine, which has been annexed by Russia, cutting off Ukraine's supply. Russia and Ukraine have long-running disputes over natural-gas supplies that are so extensive, there's a Wikipedia page devoted to them. Ukraine still relies on Russian[sic] for nuclear fuel for other power plants, and for coal, which remains a significant energy source in the country.

Also at Gizmodo, Phys.org.

Original Submission